IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society – serie

This monograph investigates verbal aggression in contemporary Polish from a usage-based and perception-oriented perspective. Drawing on a mixed-methods design, the study combines survey data on speakers’ evaluations of aggressive expressions with a corpus-based analysis of their occurrence in authentic discourse. The findings demonstrate that verbal aggression is not an inherent property of lexical items, but rather an emergent, context-dependent phenomenon shaped by interpretation, communicative setting, and social variables.By integrating linguistic, pragmatic, and computational approaches, the book challenges traditional views that treat aggressive language as a fixed category and instead proposes a gradient, non-prototypical model of verbal aggression. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between perception and actual language use, as well as to the limitations of automated hate speech detection systems.The study contributes to research in linguistics, discourse analysis, and media studies, offering new insights into the dynamics of evaluative language in contemporary communication.

The book expands and transforms multidisciplinary scholarship on the border by exposing the normative power of border making and introducing novel perspectives on borders as fluid and changeable spaces of potentiality. Building on work uncovering processes of border de/construction, the monograph highlights the relevance of the borderscapes framework beyond consolidated principles of territoriality. Underpinned by the author’s extensive research into border areas in Italy and beyond, the monograph includes several case studies constituting inflections of the border as experienced at given time-space junctures whilst highlighting that un/bordering is an everyday practice. The discussions in the different chapters transcend geographical sites to engage with key issues such as agency, affect, authenticity and heritage. Underscoring the discursive valency of bordering practices, and critiquing the colonial pervasiveness of cartographic representations, the book encompasses a methodological trajectory grounded in Linguistic Landscape studies and incorporating ethnographic and new materialist approaches to research. It foregrounds the role of the researcher in writing the borderscape into existence while challenging boundaries between methodology, ontology and epistemology.